Apparently, one of the key elements in the first nuclear bombs was building a neutron generating seed, to make sure there were enough neutrons around to start the chain reaction. It had to work for milli-seconds.

Later, the oil industry extended this technology to provide a neutron source for well logging tools. This avoided all the bureaucratic problems of transporting radioactive neutron sources. The neutron generator in the well logging tool has to work for a few hours.

It would seem to be a plausible extension of known technology to design a nuclear reactor with a fail-safe sub-critical fuel load being stimulated by an external non-radioactive neutron generator. As to why that is not in use today? The likely answer is bureaucracy.

Yes.

We could have had molten salt reactors that took care of the problems of high pressure water reactors long ago. They were doing great research, had working reactors and closed it down to build a breeder reactor made of sodium coolant (explodes on contact with water) that they placed on an earthquake fault in California. What could go wrong?

Really? Yes really.

I’ve heard of a really safe fission reactor that uses a particle accelerator to start the fusion that the numbers work out on but I don’t think they’ve spent a dime on actually building one. It’s perfectly safe. Turn off the accelerator and it stops.

Adams of Adams atomic engines had a great design that used off the shelf aircraft jet turbines and already designed ceramic fuel balls with uranium in them using nitrogen as a gas but…no money for that.

The JASON guys were tasked one time with building a safe rector and did. They built a reactor and tested a small one that you could remove all the control rods and it could literally not melt down but…only one built. We say we need small reactors but no one will build what we already have done.

I saw a smaller tomahawk fusion reactor they built and the plasma got out of control and gouged a massive hole in the structure. So what do they do but plan to build one as big as a mall. Wonder what that one would do if it lost control surrounded with tritium blankets???

But smaller, safer fusion and fission experiments are starved for funds.

I think eventually someone will make a smaller less expensive one work.

Yes. It’s just like the cloned mammoth, the return to the moon, and mass starvation. Ten years out is the perfect number: close enough that we can look forward to it, but far enough that it remains vague and nobody feels disappointed or betrayed when it fails to materialize.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love for fusion to work. But as Gavin points out, fusion’s main purpose seems to be to stymie fission development which works today.

It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the Usual Suspects’ focus on using the nuclear reactions involved in fusion (maybe coming 10, 20, 40 years in the future) is mainly a way of delaying using the nuclear reactions involved in fission (available for 70 years now).

Modern day Cathedrals.

Solemn and serene tours will be given, with careful explanations how it will all be producing net power within ten years.